Google Gets Serious About All Sides Of Gender Pay Equality

For some background, Google has a system in place to monitor and enforce gender pay equality across jobs of a similar class. At the end of every year they calculate the average comp of men and women holding the same jobs, and if they find a disparity will actually pay out the difference to the group who made less. For the first few years this system worked as expected, with extra payouts going to females who made less than their male counterparts.

Then something interesting happened at the end of 2018. When Google calculated the average male and female comps for Level 4 Software Engineers, they discovered the female workers were making more than the men. As a result, Google paid a supplemental $9.7M to 10,677 employees – which comes to $908 per person.

To be clear, Google doesn’t disclose who they’re actually paying in this program. It’s doubtful all men in these jobs received $908 – probably more likely that anyone under the benchmark received a payout. Still, it’s inspiring to see a major tech player reaching such a high degree of gender pay equality that women could easily out earn men.